Presentation: Jim Webber on "Guerilla SOA"

In one of the most entertaining presentations on the topic ever, Dr. Jim Webber, SOA practice lead at ThoughtWorks, used his presentation at the QCon conference to debunk myths about the mainstream ESB concept. Jim argues that there's an alternative to the typical, heavyweight and expensive approach to introducting SOA and and explains how a lightweight approach can yield real benefits without giving in to vendor pressure. In Jim's opinion, the industry's belief in the ESB as the core concept, at least in the way it's usually used, is fundamentally mistaken. Jim claims that an ESB often ends up being just a thin veneer on an existing mess, and how an approach that doesn't put intelligence into the network is superior.

Don't miss the full presentation (53"), which is not only very interesting from a technical standpoint, but also quite hilarious. (Jim Webber will again be presenting at QCon London 2008, which takes place in March.)

I have a question though. I'm trying to think through one of the advantages I think you can get with an ESB architecture. If all messages go via an ESB then features such as security, logging, routing, transformations can be:1. Managed centrally .. so no need for individual services to implement these features.2. New features, and updates to old features, can be managed seperately from the services themselves.

This strikes me as positive things becuase it means that different aspects of services can be managed/deployed/changed seperately.

Maybe the features I'm talking about are just technical services? You very, very briefly touched upon technical services in your presentation.

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